4 Responses to “Technology in Education: CNBC Power Lunch”

Excellent presentation on your part, I got the impression that the good folks at CNBC are more than just a little clueless on this topic. And sadly, I don’t think they learned much, they all had pretty strong preconceptions going into it.

On a related note, you should check out Mark Prensky’s “Don’t Bother Me Mom, I’m Learning” (if you haven’t already). He has a discussion in there that addresses the potential value of mobile devices in the classroom, and for education in general.

Also, I love your observation that teachers will evolve from “teaching information from the front” to being “coaches on the side” helping the students in their learning journey.

A lot of the resistance from schools and teachers – or at least teacher’s organizations – is that this new way of learning is a threat to the “business” they’ve established for themselves. Would be nice to think that they could learn something themselves from the music, movie, and book industries, but maybe that is hoping for too much.

Good presentation, and yeah, quite clueless interviewers, but that is what seems to be standard fare on news networks these days. I agree that mobile learning has a huge potential in the developing world, although it’s a bit misleading when the iPhone is shown throughout the program – although there are 2 billion cell phones in the developing world, a very small percentage of them are smartphones, and even fewer with touchscreens etc. That doesn’t mean you cannot do educational programming, but it will look a lot different from what was shown on the screen.